Everybody in the party had been warned to wear long sleeves and hiking shoes. Almost nobody did. Just a few turns down from what we were told is Madonna’s Beverly Hills château, or one of them anyway, we parked the new Chrysler 300 SRT8 and took the first step off Mulholland Drive onto a 45-degree downward slope, alternately sliding and stumbling into thickets of brown grass and sumac bushes. Soon we were invisible under a canopy of monkeypod and California black walnut trees, moving carefully to dodge the poison oak.
Down here, below what was once the dangerous macaroni-shaped curve called “Carl’s” on the illegal racetrack that Mulholland used to become at night, were rusting relics of the road’s blood-sport days. A small gully had served as a funnel for cars whose drivers had drained their talent tanks, and after passing through a debris field of doors and air-cleaner covers, we found what we had come for.
An overgrown carcass of rust and cream paint was thought to be an Alfa, or possibly a Fiat. Farther down, a green Porsche 914 lay on its belly in a streambed, the useful parts stripped long ago. Its identity plate still shined on the bulkhead like a dog tag for this proud son of Germany, still lying where it fell on foreign shores.
Supposedly, there was a fully intact teardrop trailer in the next gully over, and we had just resolved to look for it when somebody stepped on an underground yellow-jacket nest. It exploded like a burst pipeline to hell, and wasps were instantly up my nose, in my ears, and rooting around in my scalp, which suddenly blazed with pain as if the sky were raining lit cigarettes. Everybody ran downhill in a blind, flailing panic.
Mulholland Drive is a diving, thrusting, coiling asp of two-lane blacktop running the ridgeline of the Santa Monica Mountains as they traverse westward toward the sea through the Los Angeles basin.
It takes its name from William Mulholland, the Belfast-born engineer whose grand, landscapealtering water projects made modern L.A. possible. Carved out of the hillsides in 1924, it was built as a scenic road for the residents of a fast-growing Hollywood below. According to the book The Mulholland Experience, a detailed history by local authors Chris Banning and Dan Magee, it was soon discovered by Duesenberg-wheeling stars such as Gary Cooper.
When our fathers were young—after the war and before the million-dollar mansions went up, after sunset and before dawn when the rodders owned it and the cops ignored it—Mulholland was the archetype of the American outlaw road. Racers dueled in its curves, sometimes to the death, while lovers necked at its weedy overlooks—episodes that were stolen, amplified, and enshrined in pop songs and movies. Mulholland became part of the national zeitgeist of a rebellious, cause-less era.
“It was just perfect for going up there and scaring yourself to death,” says “Mr. Corvette,” Burbank-based Corvette racer and tuner Dick Guldstrand. Now 84, he first ran Mulholland in the early 1950s. “I went up there once or twice a week. Wednesdays and Thursdays were good days, starting around 9 p.m., until two or three.”
Guldstrand recalls the long nights in The Pits (later known as “Grandstands”), the wide sandy pullout where the gassers, rail-jobs, Vettes, and Jags clustered in tribal groups. Steve McQueen, Lee Marvin, Bobby Carradine, and Jim Garner were among the studio talent who were regulars.
“Some of the guys thought they were better than they were,” says Guldstrand. “I saw a guy kill himself in a ’63 Corvette. We called him ‘Mulholland Charlie.’ I don’t know if he had a tire problem or what, but he went flying right off the road and into the canyon, and that was it.”
Eventually, it all changed. As the houses went up, the cops closed in. “They started to incarcerate you, where before you’d just get your hand slapped,” says Guldstrand. In the early 1980s, the city banned nighttime parking along the road, “and that really ended it,” says author Banning, who lives just off what is now a broken and lumpy, 35-mph commuter artery clogged by tourists, tiger moms, and tiara-wearing starlets.
“They won’t repave it,” says Banning. “I think they’re worried the racers will come back.” —AR
If you’re chasing ghosts, the 2012 Chrysler 300 SRT8 seems appropriate. Here’s a broad-beamed American sedan with a diploma from the old school. The basic hardware recipe is simple: 16 pushrods feed eight prodigious jugs in one giant cast-iron, orange-enameled ship’s anchor (with aluminum heads). With 6.4 liters required to make the Hemi’s symmetrical dyno stats of 470 horsepower and 470 pound-feet of torque, we’re hardly on a trip to the high frontier of specific output.
But who cares when you uncork it? On Mulholland, between the permanent security trailer in front of Warren Beatty and Annette Bening’s house and where a boozy Chuck Connors used to stagger out of his driveway to wave a shotgun at racers, the 300 SRT8 blithely lays patches to a fare-thee-well and sounds like a German war wagon doing it. Extra sound insulation, including underbody acoustic panels, beats back extraneous road noise, so when you goose it out of “Deadman’s” and the muffler-bypass flaps open, you can clearly hear the fast reverb of a deep, 6.9-magnitude rumble.